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Smart Home voice assistants (also known as "smart home", "connected home") are still very much on vogue. But, regarding to Gartner's hype cycle  for emerging technologies, it's already on the falling edge of the curve and on the road to its plateau of productivity. Which means: the hype is almost over and the technology will get mature in approximately less than five years. Controlling devices at home with the voice is no future any more. It is presence. While Amazon's Alexa and Google Smart Home already recognize your wishes by voice commands in the cloud, there is a small place, where some offline voice assistants have emerged. These can process voice commands without a connection to the Internet, which is a major advantage for your private sphere - especially, if you consider that e.g. the German Home Office plans to listen to such devices to enlighten crimes. Fortunately, there is a way to protect your private sphere though you want to use smart...

Some months have passed since the german IT news platform golem.de published an article reporting that password managers keep the passwords in memory unencrytped. Today I took the chance to make me my own picture of the problem. I used Keepass for my little Test. First, I created a new password database and protected it with a password. Step 1: Create a new encrypted password database Then I deleted the sample entries and created a new one with a certain password (password: "Hidden information 3214" ... whoops!). The result is, that the password is not shown in the Window. Step 2: Create an entry with a password Next, I copied the password over selecting the entry item in Keepass and pressing Ctrl+C and started a hex editor, HxD, to read out the process memory of Keepass (you could also read all processes memory). Step 3: Reading process memory of KeePass The last step was to search for a part of the password string (here: "Hidden in"). The resu...